378 BIG GAME SHOOTING 



The price of all the blood shed by the skin-hunters may 

 be summed up briefly as 2 dollars 75 cents each for 'leather 

 hides ' i.e. hides of old bulls all the year round and young 

 beasts during the summer season and 3^50 cents for 'robe 

 hides.' 



My informant told me that if it would pay him he thought 

 that he could still find buffalo on the northern tributaries of 

 the Saskatchewan, east of the Rockies, as some friends of his, 

 trapping ' away back ' in 1886, had seen plenty of them, though 

 the difficulty of bringing the robes out had prevented their 

 shooting any. 



The last buffalo killed by a white man to my own certain 

 knowledge was shot by Mr. Warburton Pike far away to the 

 North, near the Great Slave Lake, when out after musk ox. 1 



Some idea of the number of the buffaloes in early days 

 may be gathered from the well-attested fact that the pioneer 

 settlers often drove through the herds for days and days with 

 buffalo in sight all round them all day long, as well as from the 

 statistics collected by Colonel Dodge, in his ' Plains of the 

 Great West.' That author states that, from information fur- 

 nished to him by the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway 

 Company, he concludes that not less than a million and a half 

 were killed in the States from 1872 to 1874. 



Colonel Dodge mentions a mountain buffalo as a variety of 

 the common buffalo, and Mr. J. E. Harting, in some remarks 

 published originally in the ' Field,' alludes to a beast of the 

 same class, which he calls ' Zacateca.' 



The Zacatecas, of which specimens were exhibited at the 

 American Exhibition of 1887, inhabit the mountainous regions 

 of Northern Mexico ; they are smaller than the buffalo, are 

 hornless, and have tails more like the tails of yaks than like 

 those of the common buffalo, who by the way is, properly 

 speaking, a bison (os americanus). I have taken the liberty 

 of calling him a buffalo because in his native haunts he has 



1 Cf. W. Pike's Darren Grounds of Northern Canada. 



